Global Wandering

Lisa wrote a marvelous post revealing the contents of her Moleskine notebook. In June 2003, I bought my first Moleskine in Aspen Colorado. I was attending a writers conference, and I just knew I had found my calling in life. Writing fiction. For five days I sat with fellow writers as we critiqued each other’s work and soaked in the wisdom of a master storyteller who served as our workshop leader.

Three years later, I still enjoy writing, but I no longer dream of publishing. Writing is hard; breaking into the Byzantine world of publishing is even harder. I admire individuals who persevere for years and years and finally get their book published. I just don’t have the drive or ambition to do that. There are too many other things I find of interest, too many projects I want to pursue.

I wrote a story. I fell in love with the characters and I waded through seven drafts, polishing each sentence until I knew the book was the best I could make it. I’ve added a link on this blog with the first eight chapters. The link has instructions for how to get the rest of the book if someone wants to see how the story ends.

I'm not secretly hoping an agent will discover it there. I'm not even banking on anyone reading it. It’s just a part of me that I finally feel like sharing.

Now for a sampling of notes I've taken in my Moleskine the last three years:

• Notes I took from the Aspen writer’s workshop. Such cryptic nuggets like “the truth is in the body” and “take a bath in the scene”
• Pages of character profiles, dialogue, plot issues for my novel
• Quote by Ann Patchett at a talk in Driggs, Idaho in October 2003 – “You don’t have to know everything, it just has to be believable by writing on what you are passionate about”
• Notes from my drive from San Diego to San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico – a town I used to stay at on the border many moons ago that I wanted to revisit because of a scene in my book
• Lists of memorable people I've seen, like the older woman who stretched out her arms and legs coming down an escalator as if she was flying
• Snippets of memorable dialogue I’ve had or overheard in my travels, such as the woman I met in the elevator at the parking garage as she escaped from a New Orleans casino, “I gotta get out of here boy. They crippled me. Whew these machines are bad.”
• List of books I read in college that influenced me. Including Heart of Darkness and Far Sargasso Sea
• Another list of interesting scenes that would make good short story starters – A man in San Diego’s gaslight district pushing an empty wheelchair. Who used to sit in the chair? Where are they?
• Mayan and Spanish words for certain plants in my book given to me by a Mayan boy who served as our guide at some archaeological ruins in Campeche, Mexico.

Those are some of the literary entries. It is also plum full of notes dealing with business, finance, and life in general. I’ll share those another time.

One final quote by Samuel T. Coleridge on the first page of my notebook:

“Nothing can permanently please if it doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is as it is and not otherwise.”

That is what I try to do with all my writing.